📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

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Day 19:

日本語: I read a bit of 伯爵と妖精 31.

中国語

中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean and one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学.

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I feel like you should remind yourself of this regularly whenever the frustration starts! It sounds great but I cry over everything so probably should go anywhere near an actual crying game. :joy:

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ooooooh, this sounds so lovely. Excited to hear more about it! I feel like it will probably end up on my ‘want to play list’ at some point lol.

I feel like your super power is finding cute manga! Which works out well for the rest of us :raccoon:

Will do! I’m not sure I will meet him on this playthrough but further play throughs are inevitable at this point haha.

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:house:

Day 21! I didn’t read, nor post yesterday… because of both busyness and bad time management. But I’m not being too harsh on myself since this month has been a big improvement in terms of reading consistently and progression.
Today I read page 188 of Kiki. I’ll be working half the day tomorrow but should be able to read a fair amount in the afternoon.

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Today’s article was 誰も助けてはくれない――雪道で動けなくなった1人の教師は投げやりになり「それなら、皆困ればいい」(全文表示)|Jタウンネット - it’s a woman’s story about her car being stuck on a snowy road and her gratitude towards a young man who helped her. Honestly this was probably the easiest article I’ve read so far in this challenge. I didn’t have much to look up and all I did was largely guessable. A nice change of pace from yesterday where I ended up giving up on the history paragraph. I tried again at night but it was still absolutely exhausting to read and not even interesting…

Some words I looked up

連なる - to stretch out in a row
ヘトヘト - totally exhausted
降雪 - this means snow fall but I did not expect the reading
四輪駆動 - 4WD

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:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220121 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXI: タヌキ憑(つ)き :raccoon:

Read today’s 百物語 from Kyoto Prefecture!

About the ghost of a tanuki that possess an おばあちゃん. She starts to develop the qualities of a tanuki (mostly the eating everything part) and they have to get the priest in the exorcise the spirit with the power of ワンワンちゃん. Moral of the story - if you find a dead animal you should bury it, otherwise the spirit may latch onto you!

Also, the other day’s reading was about Kagoshima prefecture and the volcano Sakurajima, well the google hivemind’s obviously been watching because it suggested a video to me today of it erupting (in 2019!), thought I’d share because it’s pretty insane:

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

山里「やまざと」ー Mountain Village (I could work this one out, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before)
柴刈り「しばかり」ー Firewood gathering
ミイラー Mummy (as in, a preserved corpse)
エサ「餌」ー Bait; Animal Feed; Fodder; Lure
四つん這い「よつんばい」ー On all fours; On your hands and knees
バリバリー Crunching; Munching; Tearing; Ripping (onomatopoeia)
わんわんー Doggy (It’s also the noise a dog makes which I’ve seen a lot before, I didn’t know it could mean dog as well though)

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Started reading a new book today - コーヒーの絵本. I’m a bit of a coffee nerd and I bought this book hoping it would give me the vocabulary to start being able to talk about coffee more fluently in Japanese. I’d put it to one side intending to read it before we go next time but then got chatting to someone on HelloTalk who works as a barista so it’s time to level up my coffee chat.


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Help I think I am also possessed by a tanuki.

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That’s super cool! I’ll be curious to hear how the book is.

I'll hide coffee talk

Mind if I ask about your coffee? The beans I use aren’t TOO fancy since I’m still trying to manage price, but I do order some whole to grind myself. That said, I think I get some nice coffee with the grinder and how I make it. Used to use a chemex pourover for a while and that was nice, but once I tried an aeropress, that’s probably my favorite at home coffee I’ve had. Simple but really nice.

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Me too… me too :raccoon:

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Update post for 20/1 - 21/1 | Home post here!

I ended up reading 100 pages of レンタルおにいちゃん Vol.4 yesterday, because I just needed to finish it. I’m very happy with the ending we got, especially the way the last handful of pages closed out. I’m glad I finished reading this series at a point where I could mostly follow along without looking up too much and figure out a lot through context, as I don’t feel like I missed out on a lot of the character development that was pivotal to how the last couple of chapters played out.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum today as to what I was going to read, as honestly I didn’t expect to finish Vol.2 by the end of February! :sweat_smile: I will return to よつばと! soon, but I wanted to switch up to reading some stuff not on a screen, so I scanned my bookshelves and picked out these.

Got 19 pages through カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 Vol.1, and I’m so glad there was a double page spread TL;DR recap of the original series at the start, because although I re-read it all in English last year with the intention of starting クリアカード編 this year, it was a good way adjust into that ‘new manga’ phase before starting the main story proper.

れつ!ハイキュー?! Vol.1 is something I’ll be reading slowly, maybe one page a day or so, as it’s a short 4-panel comic re-telling of the main ハイキュー!! series but in joke/gag format, so follows canon but diverges for the joke. I think I’m going to re-start ハイキュー!! to read alongside this, because from reading the first page of れつ! it lifts a lot of the dialogue straight from the original manga; nice confirmation that I remember the vocab I had to study before as I didn’t struggle to understand the first page much at all.

I’ve also played more Animal Crossing over the last couple of days, and I suppose it doesn’t really count but I played a bit of Mario Kart in Japanese yesterday whilst waiting for some food to cook.

Some words from the last couple of days!

勘違い - かんちが - misunderstanding; mistaken idea; wrong guess
心境 - しんきょう - state of mind; mental state; mental attitude
就活 - しゅうかつ - job hunting (abbreviation of 就職活動)
がき - brat; kid; urchin; little devil

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Summary post

January 21 update:
Read 5 pages of 時をかける少女 today (chapter 14, I guess). Looks like this is where the climax of the story is about to start, so it was a bit hard to stop myself from reading a bunch more instead of wrapping up my day and going to sleep :sweat_smile:

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Summary Post

January 21
君の名は , 7 pages.


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Home Post

Hehe, I read two chapters of 時をかける少女, then wanted to make my post here and @BadWeather had just made theirs and that motivated me to pick up the book again to read one more chapter! I think that’s uhhh chapter 10, 11 and 12 then? (There are no chapter numbers and I lost count, oops) It was mostly talking to the teacher, but at the very end the second time leap happened! So exited for the next chapter!

edit: also I was a little drained today and was considering not reading at all, but I thought I’d read at least a chapter to keep the streak up… but once I started is was actually quite chill and then I got hooked by the thread to read even a little more! You guys have too much of a good influence on my reading habits :heart: :sheep:

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W00t! I went to Kagoshima in Feb. 2020 and I had no idea that the last outbreak had been that recent :sweat_smile:

But it emitted ash basically every day

which was very annoying as it came down in Kagoshima City as well, depending on the wind.

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Polar Bear Café also has chapters dedicated to coffee.

I’ll never drink coffee, but it is an interesting rabbit hole.

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Home post

Day 14:

I only read two pages of :four_leaf_clover:よつばと!:four_leaf_clover: today.

:four_leaf_clover: :four_leaf_clover:

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Summary post

Summer Pockets: When did Japanese get… readable? Wild. I look up a word in practically every line, but those are opportunities to learn. A few narration portions were harder today, but at the worst I reread a bit and looked up several things. Can’t say I was ever stumped though. My prior reading has covered basically everything this game has done grammatically, so far. This is the first thing I’m really reading that I would’ve done regardless of language learning, despite how much I’ve loved some things I’ve discovered along the way (Ace Attorney is great but at least the replay was very learning-motivated). So it’s a new, particularly great feeling. I’ve got innumerable hours to go to get better at this, but at this point… I’m also there for real now. Didn’t even take that long. It’s a nice day. :slight_smile:

I think I played about AN HOUR AND A HALF (completely messed up the time when I wrote this – need to not do this the moment I stop reading and am worn out heh) but I don’t have as convenient of a clock as Steam was, and I keep forgetting to track it. Progress was slow of course, but I’m just flowing along. Today I at least met the first character, the protagonist’s aunt he’ll be living with.

Again, I’m just soaking in summer island vacation vibes. It’s a simple thing, but I’m enthralled with those sunbeams, the glow of the outside filtering in. I need it in the middle of winter; I miss the sun quite a bit.

Zoo 1: When I first posted (a bit after the start of the challenge), 15 days ago, I said I was starting the second short story. Well I’m now a few pages from finishing it! I think I’ll do that later today. Currently at 46% done, so I’m rapidly approaching the halfway point on my first book! This story has been great; but I’ll save most of my general impressions on the whole thing for when I finish the book.

The cool new word of the day is 渡りに船 (わたりにふね), a “godsend, windfall, timely offer,” etc.


Oh I know that feeling too well! My speed/stamina is so low with the short stories I am reading that I’m pausing over and over mid-climax and it’s painful!

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Yesterday
Seventy pages of Yamada kun and the Seven Witches vol.1

Today
I read the remaining 100 pages of Yamada kun and the Seven Witches and finished the first volume my fourth manga volume this year. The manga was really fun to read I will continue reading this series.

After that I read some more lines from Demonbane I still didn’t see any N1 grammar points used just lots of vocabulary I don’t
know yet but I will slowly SRS them.

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I finished NO. 6 vol. 2 last night! at 4 am, oops Things have gotten quite dramatic there at the end. Who needs sleep anyway.

Have not read any books yet today (I might read a bit later before bed) - instead I continued Doraemon Story of Seasons - one of those farming games, but with Doraemon.

Unfortuately my farm is still a little smol and sad

but I’m working on it! :smile:

Today I scraped up the little money I’ve earned so far, bought a chicken, and learned stuff about how to keep it healthy & happy. :slightly_smiling_face:


I have a cute lil’ chicken friend on my farm now! :chicken:

This game is some really nice relaxing language exposure.
It’s reasonably text heavy if you seek out the situations in which other characters talk to you, but at the same time the language level isn’t very difficult. Even the more complicated terms for certain tools etc aren’t so bad because you can easily see what item the characters are holding/talking about. I can pretty much get by without a dictionary, which is really nice for a change. I mean, within limits - hell if I know what the different kinds of fish are - but that’s also probably not that important :laughing:
I really like the art style in this, it’s really comfy. :slightly_smiling_face:

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